


Musak

by Sally M (sallymn)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:37:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallymn/pseuds/Sally%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The music grates...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Musak

**Musak**

****

The musak grates. Not only for itself - thin, cold, sharp, mechanically perfect - but because it makes you think of him. Blake.

****

Others'd say that was because everything makes you think of Blake. True enough... but someone was playing that musak in the central Dome corridors the night you went after the bastard, and the bastard took your eye, your hand, your... self.

****

The self that had been taught - like any good, well-trained Gamma brat - the rudiments of Beta class, upper Beta class. The right viscasts, the right ebooks, the right killsports, the right drugs, the right recreations - what to watch, what to read, what to say, what to hear. Your mother had gone one better, aimed one higher, to make you lower Alpha. You can fake it even now, when you have to.

****

The musak is Beta, popular among the ambitious and unsatisfied - 'old-style' instruments, tricked out to look civilised and 'upper-grade', then robotically enhanced to smooth out the common sound of reality. Your mother had had one of those, a cyberharpsichord... stored half a million tunes, most of them sounding icily alike, but she liked to play it when she had company.

****

Your sisters had even tried to play it by hand, a jingling, crude, imperfect copy of the real thing, but your mother had made you beat them for ruining it.

****

There had been company, and tinkling, perfect cyberharpsichord musak the day the military came for your mother's Gamma-graded, Beta-taught son.

****

You didn't hear it again until that night... somewhere in the lower Alpha levels where you belonged and the traitors met, someone, like your mother, playing the same plain, sharp sounds. Someone who, like your mother and sisters, played 'civilised' musak for company while you went after their enemies, and destroyed them... and were half-destroyed by one.

****

Blake. The Alpha, the real thing. Who you heard singing along to the music in a soft, warm, tuneless, unpleasantly human voice before you took him - them - down.

****

The musak grates. Auros is a world of upper Betas, mostly ambitious, many unsatisfied, all taught the same words, the same thoughts, the same culture, that you were, and through the corridors you are about to send the killers into, the music of your mother's cyberharpsichord plays. And it grates because it always makes you think of him. Blake.

**

  
**\- the end -**   


**

**Author's Note:**

>   
> Based on the prompts 'Travis' and 'harpsichord'...


End file.
